Richard Murphy’s blog post yesterday about my piece in Economia on the Fair Tax Mark was a bit of an odd one. I must say, I never thought that anybody could regard an attempt to encourage communication as an attack on free speech…

But with regards to FTM’s weighting flaw, Richard appears to be making his post-publication justifications up as he goes along. Richard’s main argument is that bias will always be present, so any choice of weighting can just be dismissed as the preference of the individual.

Which begs the question, why does the weighting in FTM deserve to not be dismissed as the preference of the individuals behind the FTM campaign?

In other words, what makes this choice of weighting appropriate over others? Simply repeating “we believe it works” is exactly the sort of behaviour that Lord Sugar binned Neil Clough for in the Apprentice last week. Especially when it obviously doesn’t work.

To bring this back to the argument Richard made about me oppressing free speech, the existence of bias suggests that it is even more important to achieve some sort of consensus over the weighting, not less.